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It may be way too early to write off the Chevrolet Volt despite the fact that General Motors decided to stop making the plug-in hybrid model for five weeks and won't start up again until April 23.

Exhibit No. 1 in this argument: today's sales results for March, which showed Volt sales zooming to 2,289 units for the month, a full 277 percent ahead of a year earlier and about the same percentage ahead of poor sales in January of this year.

That result gave Volt by far its best sales month ever and could inject some life back into a proposition that lately has been much more about politics than about the product.

GM didn't indicate in its mid-morning sales press release why Volt sales picked up so much ground. And in a subsequent conference call with Wall Street analysts and automotive journalists, Alan Batey, vice president of sales for Chevrolet, didn't shed much light either. He said that of the monthly total, 2,129 were retail sales, and 160 were fleet orders for Volt. He discounted a suggestion that attractive lease offers were behind Volt's surge, noting that such offers were about the same in March as in January and, actually, as a year ago.

Yet sources at some Chevy retailers didn't report any kind of broad-based surge in retail sales had developed in March over February. It's possible Volt's quick rise wasn't much noticed by many dealers; the addition of about 1,000 sales of Volt in a month's time, spread across about 3,000 Chevy dealers in the United States, would mean the sale of only an extra one-third of a unit per dealership, on average, in March compared with February. Meanwhile, a source with knowledge about federal-government fleet orders didn't believe the Obama administration had placed any big order for Volts lately.

In any event, there appeared to be some hope that strong Volt sales in March comprised more than just a one-month blip. Early last month, GM announced February sales results for Volt that had recovered to 1,023 units from only about 600 units in January -- a month that had been dominated by continued publicity over Volt's fire-crash issue. But then last month, GM also announced the suspension of Volt production and further soured the waters by blaming media "exaggeration" of the fire risk for Volt's slump.

While many analysts jumped all over GM's move as an indicator of corporate resignation that Volt sales would be going into the dumper over the long term, there were some complications. First of all, the move to stop Volt output temporarily involved factors of production balancing that were significant. GM also has begun to ramp up output of the new-generation Chevrolet Malibu at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant where Volt is built, and manufacturing executives wanted to throttle back Volt production somewhat anyway to synchronize it with full-volume manufacture of Malibu. GM is spending $120 million on tooling at the plant to ready it for the new Malibu.

Volt continues to make the most common sense to many consumers of any of the new-era EVs because it carries a gasoline engine, unlike the Nissan Leaf. And now Nissan is adding some "content" to Leaf, presumably at least in part in recognition of the need to make the model a more competitive proposition to Volt.

The possibility that Volt could rectify itself in the marketplace is one reason not everyone at GM is happy Volt has emerged as the poster project for Obama's green initiatives, even though the president is now trying to boost the tax credit for such alternative-energy vehicles to $10,000 from the current $7,500. His hyping of Volt made it too easy a target for conservative opponents who were easily able to conflate Volt, and its substantial subsidies by taxpayers, with true train wrecks such as Solyndra.

Easily overlooked is the fact that nothing actually was wrong with Volt's crash protection all along, as the federal government eventually acknowledged -- and GM went ahead and structurally strengthened Volt under the hood, anyway. This, too, will redound to Volt's benefit over the long term.

GM executives have said that the company would make a long-term decision about Volt output this spring. Has the March sales result made that decision easier, or more difficult?